North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Colorado, Mr. Gardner, for his leadership on this issue--together with the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Corker--for bringing us to this moment. This is a rare bipartisan moment, where the Senate has come together and agreed to debate, vote, and pass an important bill that imposes sanctions on one of the most dangerous regimes in the world.

Recently, I was in Hawaii at the Pacific Command and we asked Admiral Harris, a four-star U.S. Navy admiral who heads Pacific Command, to rank the areas of the world that he was most concerned about, the regimes that he thought represented the biggest danger to peace. He listed North Korea as No. 1.

That may be because of the proximity of his area of responsibility to North Korea, but there is no question an unstable leader with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles is a threat not only to the region but to the United States as well.

We know over the weekend North Korea successfully launched a long- range rocket and put a satellite into orbit. This was done in defiance of sanctions and represents a dangerous trend of an increasingly hostile and unstable North Korea. It was particularly alarming for several reasons.

First, the same technology that put that satellite in orbit can be used to deliver a nuclear weapon. Long-range ballistic missiles have the potential to hit the U.S. homeland. That is why North Korea has been considered a serious threat to our country, not just the region but our country as well. The timing of this launch was also very concerning because just last month North Korea claimed it had tested the components of a hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear weapon that is more powerful than an atomic bomb--which we knew they had, but this represented an escalation, if it is true.

The idea that North Korea could soon develop advanced nuclear weapons, along with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and deliver them to our shores is a frightening proposition. Unfortunately, every day we grow closer to that reality.

I will just pause for a minute to say this is another reason why our missile defense systems are so important, not just to the safety of our friends and allies but also increasingly to the United States. I know in Colorado a lot of those efforts are headed up to provide that effective deterrent and missile defense system to the threat of the intercontinental ballistic missiles.

I have to be honest with you and say I am puzzled why the President hasn't done more on this issue to date, but while the President sits on the sidelines--I think somebody called it strategic patience--it has been a failure, not just patience. Patience I think of as a virtue but certainly not in this context.

Nevertheless, the Senate will do its part to make sure the regime in North Korea feels some consequences for its belligerent, illegal actions. Today we will vote on the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act. This bill mandates new sanctions on North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile program, and, importantly, it will provide an overall strategy to help address North Korea's human rights abuses and combat its cyber activities. I don't think most people realize that in addition to its belligerence and its violating international norms, North Korea is a serial human rights abuser. Literally, because of its focus on its finances on military arms and its standing army, North Korea has seen many, many, many of its people starve to death for lack of an adequate food supply. So this is a rogue regime, it is a dangerous regime, and one we need to make sure feels the consequences of its actions.

This bill will help hold North Korea accountable, which is more than we have seen from the administration. I want to point out that North Korea's provocative actions are just another symptom of the Obama doctrine gone wrong. I mentioned strategic patience, which is hardly a strategy for keeping the world safe.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Through his words and deeds, the President continues to discredit and undercut American leadership around the world. As a result, the world is even more unstable and conflict-ridden than when he assumed office. It is absolutely the fact that in the absence of American leadership, tyrants, thugs, and bullies feel emboldened, and our friends and allies question our loyalty and whether they can rely on us or whether they have to go it alone and build the capacity to defend themselves in the absence of a strong America.

Many recall that when he ran for office, the President heavily criticized the foreign policy choices of his predecessor, particularly the surge in Iraq. I happened to be in the Senate during that time. I remember those debates. The Democratic leader, Senator Reid, said the surge would never work, and many were skeptical because frankly it represented a bold dramatic move.

Well, not only did President Obama's decision to hastily withdraw in Iraq after the successful surge--not only did his decision to hastily withdraw from Iraq squander the hard-won progress achieved by the surge, that country is now one of a number of countries in the Middle East in shambles. We are seeing our friends and our allies--together with American advisers on the ground, special operations forces in a train-and-assist mission--trying to regain control of cities such as Ramadi that were won as a result of the blood and the treasure of the United States.

Let's look at a few things where they stand today. Over the past 2 years, ISIS has captured city after city where American troops shed that blood, sweat, and tears to bring relative peace. The border that used to exist between Syria and Iraq is gone. It has literally been erased. In spite of President Obama's misguided nuclear deal with Iran, Iranian influence in Iraq has grown, not waned. I do find it interesting that speaker after speaker--even though we are talking about North Korea--is trying to come to the floor and speak about Iran after having allowed the President's ill-advised nuclear deal to go through, which guarantees a pathway for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

As a result of the administration's paralysis, Syria, too, has plunged deeper and deeper into chaos. Now we not only have a security problem on our hands, we have millions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees internally displaced or flooding across international borders into places such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Europe. I have visited some of those refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan. These people are doing what we all would do. They are fleeing for their survival because frankly, once the President drew that red line in Syria, when it came to the use of illegal weapons, the President never did anything to enforce it or make sure that Bashar al-Assad felt or suffered any consequences. So the President's inaction, time after time, place after place, has real consequences. The vacuum left as a result of the U.S. retreat in the Middle East has provided an open door for other countries to expand their influence there, as we have seen and as we continue to see on a daily basis.

Russia is the prime example. It continues to extend its influence through indiscriminate bombing campaigns that yield little regard for civilian lives. The Russian bombing campaign doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians. Russian forces are even actively fighting against American-backed groups and working to undermine them at every turn.

Of course this doesn't even touch on Russia's aggressive actions along its own border with respect to Ukraine in NATO's backyard. Unfortunately, Russia has no reason to believe that the United States, under the current leadership of the Commander in Chief, will challenge it anywhere--not in the Middle East, not in Europe.

I could go on and on about other countries that are feeling emboldened, like a belligerent China in the South China Sea, or, as I mentioned a moment ago, a newly financed and emboldened Iran, the No. 1 state sponsor of international terrorism. When the administration basically wrote a check for $50 billion to Iran, that Secretary Kerry, Vice President Biden, and others acknowledged could be used to finance international terrorism, it seemed to have no impact whatsoever because they were so determined to cut this bad deal with Iran.

The point is that our retreat and our lack of leadership around the world only underscore the President's lack of a larger foreign policy strategy. We have asked him time and again: Please tell us what your strategy is. The President sends over a proposed authorization for the use of military force against ISIS, and we find out the real reason he did that is not because he thinks he lacks authority to do what he is doing now but because they want to tie the hands of future Presidents in terms of what that President could do under that authorization for the use of military force. But we keep asking, and all we hear is crickets--silence. We keep asking for a serious, comprehensive strategy to guide the foreign policy and national security efforts of the United States, and the President simply doesn't feel like it is his obligation to deliver one, opting instead for tactics that are guaranteed not to win, saying: Well, we bombed ISIS.

Well, that is all well and fine. But at some point, once you bomb ISIS, unless you have somebody who can occupy that territory, the terrorists are going to come right back in. We have friends and allies, such as the Kurds and other countries in the Middle East that have said: Well, we will help be the boots on the ground if you will help supply us, to which they are not provided any sort of answer.

I believe the American people do deserve better, and the men and women in uniform who have put their lives on the line deserve better. They deserve a strategy. They deserve the support to be able to accomplish the mission their country has asked them to accomplish.

So I am glad that in the absence of leadership from the White House, the Congress has decided to take up some of the slack here to fill the gap left by the President's inattention to this important issue. If the President won't step up to the plate and take these threats seriously enough to come up with a strategy to actually defeat them, the American people can trust the Senate to address it, and we will do so today on a bipartisan basis, insofar as it applies to the threat in North Korea.

So it is my hope that we will send a strong bipartisan message to North Korea that their repeated provocations will not go unanswered. Mental Health and Our Criminal Justice System

Mr. President, I just came from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which was one of the most unusual hearings I have attended since the time I have been in the Senate--certainly on the Judiciary Committee. Usually on the Judiciary Committee the habit is for the majority to select witnesses and then the minority gets to select witnesses, and then witnesses come out and are proxy fighters for the particular policy differences that members of the committee have--not today. Today, thanks to Chairman Grassley, the senior Senator from Iowa, the Judiciary Committee had a consensus panel on the subject of mental health and its intersection with our criminal justice system.

What we heard was that, increasingly, our jails and our prisons, our criminal justice system, and the homeless that we see on our streets are a product of a failed policy--one that said: Yes, we need to move people out of institutions and out of hospitals. But, of course, there is the promise--or at least it was the hope--that they would have somewhere else to go to get treatment and housing and the like.

Today what we heard reaffirmed from the sheriff of Bexar County, TX-- San Antonio, my hometown--and from so many of the other witnesses from across the country is that now our jails, our prisons, and the criminal justice systems have become de facto warehouses for the mentally ill, completely ill-suited to deal with what they need, which is treatment, supervision, and help--and the families, too, who need additional tools available for them to turn to when they need help with a loved one who has become mentally ill.

So I have introduced legislation that we talked about during the hearing today called the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act, modeled off of successful experiments and programs in places like North Carolina, which we heard from before, San Antonio, Virginia, and elsewhere. I am sure there are a number of good stories.

This is the way I think Congress ought to legislate, rather than to dream up here behind closed doors some grand scheme--the masters of the universe trying to decide what is good for all 320 million of us in a one-size-fits-all approach. We have seen the disastrous consequences of that sort of thinking. Rather than that, let's look at what has actually proven to work in our cities, counties, and our States, and then scale that up, where appropriate, to apply more broadly after we have proven that it actually works. That is what my legislation, the Mental Health and Safe Communities Act, is designed to do.

As we will look--I believe tomorrow--in the Judiciary Committee at the opioid and heroin crisis that is being experienced in so many parts of our country and as we look, as we have, at reforming our prison systems to provide more incentives for people who are low-risk and mid- level offenders, if they will accept the opportunity to help themselves to deal with their underlying drug or alcohol problem, to learn a skill, to get a GED, to better prepare for life on the outside based on the experiences in Texas and elsewhere, we can actually lower crime rates, lower recidivism rates, and save taxpayers a lot of money.

So whether it is dealing with the mental health issue and its intersection with the criminal justice system or dealing with our prison system, which used to believe that rehabilitation was an important part of what their obligation was, or dealing with this opioid and heroin abuse, we have a lot to do to make sure that our criminal justice system is brought into the 21st century and that we no longer punish people who mainly need help.

As somebody who is a recovering member of the Texas judiciary for 13 years, I certainly believe there are some people whom you can't help and whom you must punish. But there is a large segment of people-- whether it is drug or alcohol related, or whether it is mental health issues--who will accept our help and will turn their lives around if given that opportunity.

I just wanted to say a few words about that because I feel so strongly about the importance of what we talked about at that hearing.

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Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham) and the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan).

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